Yemeni students protest after a University of Sana'a student was arrested in connection with the cargo plane bomb plot. Photograph: Gamal Noman/AFP/Getty

One of the two mail bombs found on US-bound cargo aeroplanes had travelled on two separate passenger flights before being found, a spokesman for Qatar Airways said today.

The devices were discovered in printer cartridges on board two Chicago-bound cargo planes on Friday following a tip-off from Saudi intelligence.

One was in the hold of a plane that landed at East Midlands airport after flying from Cologne, and the other was on a plane in Dubai.

Barack Obama's counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, said today authorities "have to presume" there might be more mail bombs.

The Qatar Airways spokesman said the device discovered in Dubai was put on a passenger flight between the Yemeni capital, Sana'a, and Doha, in Qatar, before being shipped in a separate plane to Dubai, where it was discovered.

The US deputy national security adviser, John Brennan, told CNN that nobody had yet claimed responsibility for the bombs, but added: "It certainly bears all the hallmarks of AQAP (al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula).

"It's very similar, in terms of the types of materials and the construction, to some other devices we have seen – the Christmas Day bomber, an attempted attack against one of the senior Saudi counter-terrorism officials.

"AQAP has been outspoken in its determination to carry out attacks. Yes, it certainly points in that direction."

US officials said the Saudi-born bombmaker Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, understood to be responsible for making the Christmas Day bomb, was the prime suspect for constructing the devices.

The devices found on Friday and on the Christmas Day bomber are all believed to have contained the powerful explosive PETN.

Brennan said the printer cartridge bombs were "very sophisticated" in the way they had been constructed and concealed.

The home secretary, Theresa May, said investigators did not believe the perpetrators would have known where the device found at East Midlands airport would have been when they planned for it to explode.

Hanan al-Samawi, a 22-year-old student at the University of Sana'a, was arrested after police surrounded a house in the Yemeni capital. Her 45-year-old mother was arrested with her, the Yemeni human rights activist Abdel-Rahman Barman said.

He said that, according to her university colleagues, Samawi was not known to be involved in political activity or to have ties to Islamist groups. She had not been allowed access to a lawyer.

Dozens of students staged a sit-in in the courtyard of Sana'a University engineering faculty today, protesting Samawi's innocence.

Authorities were also looking at two language institutions in Yemen, investigating the possibility that the plotters could have been associated with them.

The Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, told reporters the US and UAE had provided intelligence that helped to identify Samawi.

May today promised to review security on cargo planes. "Certainly, we have to look at our processes of searching and how we detect these devices," she told BBC1's Andrew Marr Show.

About this article

Dubai cargo plane bomb was on two passenger flights before discovery

This article was published on
the Guardian website
at 11.00 EDT on Sunday 31 October 2010.
It was last modified at 04.59 EDT on Friday 3 October 2014.
It was first published at 07.53 EDT on Sunday 31 October 2010.